Saturday, August 5, 2017

Drive Refactors with a Git Pre-Push Hook

When I'm writing code, if I see something I want to fix, I write a quick FIXME comment. When I'm working on my own projects, this is no big deal. But I don't like adding FIXMEs to code at work, or in open source repos. And really, I prefer not to keep them hanging around in my own repos, either. So I set up a git pre-push hook. It looks like this:

This code uses ag to make sure that there are no FIXMEs in my code, skipping dependency directories since they're not my problem, and either returns a Unix failure code, interrupting the push, if FIXMEs are present, or a success code, allowing the push to proceed, if they aren't.

In other words, if I tell git to push code which contains a FIXME, git effectively says no.

This worked well for a while. But soon, at work, somebody else added a FIXME to a repo. So I commented out my hook for a few days or weeks, and then, when I had a spare second, I fixed their FIXME. But soon enough, somebody else added a FIXME, and it was harder to fix. So I commented out the hook, and forgot all about it.

Eventually, though, I had to do some pretty complicated work, and I generated a lot of FIXMEs in the process. As an emergency hack, I uncommented the hook, did my main work, tried to push my branch, and got automatically chastised for trying to push a FIXME. So I went in, fixed them, and pushed the branch.

This is my routine now. If I'm dealing with a big enough chunk of work that I can't take a break to fix a FIXME, I just uncomment the hook for the period of time that I'm working on that topic branch. It's a really good way to stay on task while also putting together a to-do list for refactoring. You basically can't finish the branch until you go through the FIXME to-do list, but you're 100% free to ignore that to-do list, and focus on the primary task, until it's time to push the branch. So you can easily build refactoring into every topic branch without getting distracted (which is the primary risk of refactoring as you go).

It's probably pretty easy to modify this hook so that it only looks at unstaged changes, so I might do that later on, but it works pretty well as a habit already.